Multiple cropping, an essential practice in global agriculture

In this perspective paper we examine multiple cropping systems, agricultural systems with mixed cultivation of several crops in space, e.g. intercropping, agroforestry or time, e.g. rotations, double cropping, cover cropping. It is a global practice essential for intensifying and diversifying agriculture.

Such integrated forms of crop production are wide-spread globally and increasingly promoted due to their benefits to biodiversity conservation and as part of nature-based solutions for climate mitigation and adaptation among others. Yet, these systems can also entail trade-offs such as yield penalties due to resource competition. Positive and negative outcomes, and thus the adoption of multiple cropping practices by farmers, depend highly on local context and the complex interactions within the specific systems. Their evaluation across scales can hence hardly be done experimentally but requires large-scale modelling.

The high relevance and complexity of multiple cropping is contrasted by the simplicity of crop cultivation assumed in the various types of land use modelling systems employed in agricultural assessment and foresight studies. These typically assume the cultivation of monocrops with productivity solely driven by exogenous nutrient and irrigation water inputs. Consequently, also policymaking informed by such modelling systems can only tap into a very narrow knowledge pool. This gap indicates urgent need to improve the modelling of multiple cropping systems to fully assess their outcomes across geographies and over time.

Novel ideas, data and methods for multiple cropping modelling

As a community of crop modelers, we reviewed scientific literature on multiple cropping to understand which novel results, ideas, data or methods could significantly advance the integration of multiple cropping in landuse modelling.

It is often assumed that data and basic understanding is not complete enough to consider multiple cropping in land use modelling which we argue is not the case. Here are some examples:

• Development of new theoretical frameworks or models that explain certain phenomena in multiple cropping systems, such as within stand microclimate in agroforestry systems or biogeochemical carryover effects between crops over time.
• Discovery of unexpected results, anomalies or exceptions that open new avenues for research, such as the finding that land surface temperatures are higher in double cropping systems than in single cropping systems where it is often assumed that because of the longer growing period and ground coverage it would be the opposite effect.
• Description of best practices for implementing multiple cropping into land use modelling to inspire uptake by other research teams, such as developed for the LPJmL, SWAT and JULES-crop models.
• Introduction of advanced methodologies that enhance research efficiency and scale by improving data availability for land use modelling, such as using vegetation index time series from medium resolution satellite imagery, land use classifications using high-resolution satellite imagery, expert surveys and grower consultations, national crop calendars and phenological observations or the integration of several of the above methods.

Waha, K., Folberth, C., Biemans, H. et al. Land use modelling needs to better account for multiple cropping to inform pathways for sustainable agriculture. Commun Earth Environ 6, 756 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-02724-0

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